Getting Dragged Down by Too Much Detail

GUSTAVE Flaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary is often lauded for its brilliant development of personality in the creation of the title character, an idealisitic dreamer who destroys her bourgeois existence in her search for love and excitement.

Flaubert

Herbert Lottman

Boston: Little, Brown

$24.95

And Flaubert's oft-quoted assertion that "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," would lead one to believe that--if Emma Bovary is indeed a self-referential creation--the author himself must have been a character of depth and contradiction.

However, Herbert Lottman's biography Flaubert never manages to bring out that character. While it hints vaguely, almost unintentionally, at contradiction and complexity in the famous author's life, the biography mires itself in dates and detail to such an extent that the personality it seeks to describe is nearly lost.

Lottman warns readers in his preface that, "the biographer of a seminal figure such as Gustave Flaubert may on occasion appear to resemble a newspaper editor handling a story."

This warning is quite appropriate; the biography that follows is an exhaustive cataloging of facts, at times so specific as to give not only the date and day of the week that an event occured, but the time of day as well. No news story could be more detailed, or more frequently wearisome.

Fortunately, Flaubert's life, which spanned more than half of the 19th century--a turbulent time in French politics and one of the more fruitful in French intellectual and literary history--is in itself interesting enough to save the book and make it fairly engaging.

BORN in 1821 (at 4 a.m. on December 12), Flaubert spent his early years in Rouen, an industrial town in Normandy. He began writing when he was only eight years old, and despite several years of education to practice law, he remained a writer all of his life.

Although Flaubert, who was always engaged in a search for just the right word or phrase, sometimes wrote only a few lines in a day, his parents amassed quite a good deal of land (at least a full chapter of the book details its location and exact acerage), which provided a consistent income in rents.

He spent most of his youth engaged in love affairs, traveling with friends and family and writing for himself. The rest of his time he spent recuperating from the epileptic fits and venereal disease that plagued him all of his life.

His first book, Madame Bovary, was not published until he was 36 years old. It brought him instant fame, when he was brought to trial on charges of "outrage to public and religious morals and morality."

Flaubert won the case, and literary Paris awaited the advent of each of his successive books with anticipation, although they were not always well-received.

It seems that the author himself became a frequent figure at the Parisian salons and dinners, despite the fact that he frequently referred to himself as a "bear" or a "hermit," hibernating away from the bourgeois society which he held in great disdain.

In contradictions like this one--and Flaubert's refusal to marry, despite the fact that he had many lovers and professed himself "in love" several times--lie the mystery of the author's character which might have led him to identify with the ill-fated Emma Bovary.

Lottman points out these contradictions simply by telling the story, but he never addresses them, and this lack of explanation leaves the character of Flaubert disappointingly flat.

This is particularly true since Lottman obviously did extensive research for the book. The entire narrative is framed around letters to and from Flaubert. Correspondance with his sister, his niece, his friends and his most notorious lover, Louise Colet, give flesh to what is otherwise largely a chronology.

SOME of the letters give tantalizing glimpses into a personality who was as controversial in his lifetime as he still is today, but they are too frequently cut off before the reader's appetite is satisfied. Flaubert seems to have sought the mot juste, the perfect word, as much in his personal writing as in his novels, and the passages which include letters he wrote are beautiful. It would be better to read a collection of his letters than to read Lottman's biography.

The book should be commended for its accuracy and its flow. Although the dates, the detailed accounts of Flaubert's money problems and the cataloging of his often grotesque illnesses can be overwhelming at times, the author's life is by no means dull.

And Lottman does pull successfully the political and social controversies of the times into the narrative, giving the story a context that is far more interesting when he manages not to say whether it was one Saturday or the next Tuesday.

Unfortunately, the incredible detail of the biography overwhelms the reader. Under the guise of a framework, it consistently intrudes on the story and prevents the reader from becoming truly engaged in what was probably a fascinating life.